Tag: Collaboration

One of the principles of the company is to work with the clients, understand their business and build a product that satisfy their needs by enhancing a feature-rich interface. File locking is one of the most needed by organizations in today’s business environment. Users are constantly working on the same document and a restriction to file access is sometimes mandatory.

There are a lot of articles about document collaboration and project collaboration from a variety of vendors but rarely do they talk about bookmark or web links collaboration which is can often be a key part of any project.

This blog post will outline how easy this is with Storage Made Easy in which it can be done against any Storage back-end, be that a consumer storage cloud such as DropBox, Google Drive, OneDrive etc or a business or private back end storage cloud such as OpenStack Swift, Cloudian, CleverSafe, Amazon S3, RackSpace etc. In all more than 45 different private and public storage clouds are supported.

Requirements:

– A Storage Made Easy Business or on-premise account
– The Storage Made Easy web collaborations links plug-in available from the SME Cloud Tools Page.

We will be using a Storage Made Easy SaaS business Account to demonstrate this functionality.

First we simply add the Collaboration links plugin to our web browser. In this case it is Safari but Chrome and Firefox are also supported.

Once logged in all the folders from the various private and public cloud repositories are available to capture / bookmark links.

Once you find a page you want to add to your team repository you can use the Collaboration Links plugin to capture it.

In our case this in iOS 7 page on multi-tasking that the iOS Dev team would be interested in.

If we log directly into the Cloud File Server from the web (or any of the mobile tools or desktop clients) I see the link I just shared in my team folder. Any team member can launch the link or visit the site by double clicking on the link. I can also choose to collaborate on it with other team members by adding comments.

These comments are shown on all devices and the team users who have permissions to the folder/file receive an email notification that there is a comment for review:

As usual with StorageMadeEasy all the events related to the file are audit tracked:

To summarise this post has shown how it is possible to collaborate on web links / bookmarks in a way that centralises collaboration with the alternative often pinging the link over email and any subsequent comments between team members delivered the same way. In the SME as well as centralising the collaboration the comments and interactions are indexed and therefore appear in search results and also the link itself becomes part of the corporate repository.

We recently announced that we had launched our OpenS3 beta. The purpose of OpenS3 is to allow any Amazon S3 user to be able to access the SMEStorage platform and take advantage of all the channels and features we have. This means if you would like to have access to your Amazon S3 files via your iPhone for example you now can. If you want to share your Amazon S3 files or use them on Facebook you can , and much more.

After you have registered for the beta, using OpenS3 is simple. You merely enter your Amazon S3 keys (and choose to store them on our servers or not. If not you will need to enter them each time you access your account) and then we import the metadata from you S3 file to the SMEStorage platform. We don’t move the files themselves or change them in anyway. This means you can still access them from any other S3 tool that you choose.

Once you have synchronised you can then choose to change your filenames and store the files in a proper directory structure. Again this will not change the core S3 files. We overlay a proper directory structure on top of S3.

Once you have completed this process you can use the rich SMEStorage filemanager to access all the additional functionality that we provide over and above Amazon S3 such as being able to back up any email account to S3, easy file sharing, unique url for each file, Public files, Business Groups, Faxing, and integration with Flickr, PicniK, Zoho etc.

SMEStorage is now integrated with ScribD using their iPaper API which allow PDF’s to be viewed inline within the browser from SMEStorage without having to download them to view them. This compliments existing integration within the SMEStorage platform that allows users to view and edit Microsoft Office documents and view and edit graphic files.

It’s now possible to import your AOL xDrive files to the SMEStorage platform. Once you have logged in, just look for the “AOL xDrive import” link. Now, despite the announcement from AOL that xDrive is to close down, xDrive users have an easy option to migrate their files.

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